Runners, cyclists and other athletes are increasingly using online tools to track fitness. Some online tools provide routes so that an athlete may select a route and record his or her performance for the route. In some cases, an individual athlete may define a route for personal use or for sharing. This can allow the athlete to track performance gains or losses over time for the same route.
Some athletes find it motivating to use the same route as others and compare results. This can be a relatively straightforward task if athletes explicitly select predefined routes for workouts (e.g., by indicating to an online tool that fitness data was collected on a previously defined “Route 1”).
However, unless athletes associate their fitness data with defined routes (e.g., by selecting the defined route for which fitness data is collected) it can be difficult to map multiple athletes' GPS data onto known locations of routes, such as streets, paths or trails so that fitness activity at various locations can be analyzed.
Accordingly, it would be advantageous to provide an activity tracking system that allows athletes associate their fitness data with defined routes and maps GPS data from various activities onto known locations of routes, such as streets, paths or trails. It would also be advantageous if the activity tracking system were configured to analyze the collected data from the various activities and provide insight concerning use of the routes, including metrics on commonly used portions of the routes and metrics on usage of the route by various people groups such as women, men, runners, bikers, etc. It would be additionally advantageous if the activity tracking system were configured to analyze the collected data and automatically identify previously unknown sections or connecting paths within the route.